FOO FIGHTERS‘ “Medicine At Midnight” has landed at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Album Sales chart with first-week sales of 64,000 copies in the U.S.
The Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales.
FOO FIGHTERS previously topped the chart with 2017’s “Concrete And Gold” and 2011’s “Wasting Light”.
23,000 of “Medicine At Midnight”‘s first-week sales came from vinyl LP sales, with CDs and digital albums registering 20,000 each.
“Medicine At Midnight” came out on February 5 via Roswell Records/RCA Records. The LP is a nine-song, 37-minute effort which was produced by the FOO FIGHTERS and Greg Kurstin.
The first single from the disc, “Shame Shame”, was released in November. An accompanying music video for the song was directed by Paola Kudacki and co-stars FOO FIGHTERS frontman Dave Grohl and Sofia Boutella. “Shame Shame” renders in stunning black and white an interpretation of a recurring dream that’s haunted Grohl since his childhood days.
Grohl told SiriusXM‘s Alt Nation about the “Medicine At Midnight” musical approach: “It’s our 10th album, and it’s our 25th anniversary. We’re. like, okay, let’s look back at all the stuff that we’ve done before. We’ve made that loud sort of noisy punk rock fast stuff. We’ve made the sleepy acoustic kind of gentle acoustic record stuff. We’ve done the three- or four-minute-long bubblegum rock and roll, pop, single thing before. And it was, like, well, what haven’t we done? And we had never really made a groove-oriented sort of party record.
“It’s hard to put the words ‘dance’ or ‘funk’ or ‘disco’ in the same sentence as the FOO FIGHTERS; it scares the shit out of me,” Dave admitted. “But all of us grew up loving rock and roll records that you could like bounce around to, like THE CARS. Like, oh my God, we love THE CARS. Or David Bowie‘s ‘Let’s Dance’. Or POWER STATION. Or THE [ROLLING] STONES‘ ‘Tattoo You’ — things like that. We’re, like, ‘All right. We’ve never really explored that territory before. Let’s do it.
“We’re lucky in that everybody in the band has diverse influences and everybody loves different kinds of music, but I honestly think we’re capable of doing almost anything,” he said. “So if we put our minds to it, we can kind of chameleon and turn into a death metal band, or we could be like THE CARPENTERS. So we just have to come together and make the decision, like, ‘All right, which way do we wanna go? Which way are we gonna turn the wheel?’ And this time we did it to make this party record.”
